Hellooo World!
Yeah. So. I'm going to give this thing a try. My blog has been down for the longest time, and figuring it out has been more than I can really handle at this time. Which has stretching into two years of paying for web hosting that basically displays one static page. Yay me, and welcome to the adhd tax.
I've also spent the last two years wanting to write. In part I blame Anil Dash and posts like this one: The Web Renaissance takes off, but the reality is that I've always wanted to write. I've always wanted to blog. I created my first blog around 1998, before blogs even existed. For a while, I actually was a pretty prolific blogger. But then blogging became work, and I started to feel the need to produce posts that met a certain level of quality. Eventually the weight of what was undone became overwhelming (did I mention adhd?) and it all stopped. Blogging also pretty much died around that time.
Things began to change when Substack started to gain steam. I added a few free subscriptions. But just as I was ready to get started, the Nazi issue blew up. I still ended up creating my substack in January 2023 as it was starting to look like they might do something, but nothing happened. So I added a few meandering posts, but the idea that I was supporting the far right didn't sit well with me.
Over time the issue faded. More and more people were publishing there, people who I didn't think would be there still if the site hadn't fixed the issue. All this while, my desire to blog continued to poke at me, an unscratched itch, and I finally went back this month and made my first post in over a year and a half. In essence, I asked myself the question "why not write?"
Still, I wasn't sure. The more I poked around at Substack, the more it looked like a place for serious writing, not for self-indulgent blog posts. So I waited.
The answer came soon and serendipitously.
Use anything else. Coming from someone who's opinion on these kinds of things I take very seriously.
Among the replies, was a link to Noted.io. It seemed like a really interesting alternative, where people could subscribe for as little as $0.01. The idea of enabling micropayments, and letting people pay just a token amount to subscribe really appealed to me, and I signed up.
But then I started poking around. For starters, the "mood" of the place felt wrong. It reminded me of Hubpages, where I wrote c. 2008, as I was desperately trying to earn money writing online. And then I realised that because of their revenue model, there was no free tier for readers. As far as I can tell, everyone had to pay at least 1 cent a month.
Then chance took me somewhere else: a Mastodon post from Molly White. As GorillaWarfare, Molly has been a Wikipedian whose work I deeply admire, especially her willingness to serve on the Arbcom for some absurd amount of time (six years, by the look of it). The Arbcom is the worst job on the project, by a long shot, but also a place we desperately need good people. She has since gone on to do a lot of other remarkable work.
Anyway, I discovered that Molly was now primarily working independently on her newsletter CitationNeeded, something I had vaguely been aware of, but hadn't actually read. And poking around the site I came across a post about her migration from Substack to self-hosted Ghost.
I learned a few things there. One is that there are much better options for hosting these days (though I ended up a bit daunted by the process at Digital Ocean). The other was that GhostPro really isn't all that expensive. The fee is daunting at first glance, and absolutely won't make sense if I don't stick with it. But with the option of a free trial that won't charge your card automatically when it's up it's worth a shot.
So now I'm here. For the moment at least.